From the Church to the Union Hall

"The songs of the working people have
always been their sharpest statement," wrote novelist
John Steinbeck, "and the one statement that cannot be
destroyed....Songs are the statement of a people. Listening
to their songs teaches you more about a people than any other
means, for into the songs go all the hopes and hurts, the
angers, fears, the wants and aspirations."

Whether it's the turn-of-the-century
"Hard Times in the Mill," describing how
"cotton mill boys don't make enough/To buy them tobacco
and a box of snuff," or a "A Miner's Life,"
with its warning of both natural dangers ("watch the
rocks, they're falling daily") and exploitation by the
bosses ("Keep your hand upon the dollar/And your eye
upon the scale"), working people have turned to music to
limn their experience, protest their conditions, heap scorn
on oppressors, celebrate heroes, and rally one another in the
cause of organized labor.

Sometimes the writers and composers of
these songs are known, as in the case of Florence Reece.
After a band of deputy sheriffs broke into her cabin looking
for her husband, Sam, a union organizer, she tore off a page
from a wall calendar and penned what perhaps is the most
famous song to come out of the coal fields: the defiant,
decision-demanding "Which Side Are You On?"

Woody Guthrie, of "This Land is Your
Land" fame, is perhaps the most famous balladeer of
20th-century working-class life. Taken on their own, his
hundreds of songs provide almost a complete history of
20th-century working lifesongs like "So Long, It's
Been Good to Know You" (on the migrants of the Great
Depression), "Union Maid" (a song of praise for the
courage of union women), and "1913 Massacre" (the
story of the death of 72 people, mostly children, during a
Christmas party of strikers in a door-rushing panic initiated
by "copper boss thugs").

Just as often, however, the songs of
working people have been written anonymously. Their power and
importance were not diminished because of such anonymity. For
working people, a song was the story of their lives, as well
as a weapon to change that life. Together, these working
people have given rise to a body of songs and ballads that
constitute one of the country's richest cultural treasures.

The Wobblies, the name given to members of
the militant International Workers of the World (the utopian
labor union that flourished in the early decades of this
century), said it pointedly: "Right was the tyrant king
who once said, 'Beware of a movement that sings.'... Whenever
and wherever the oppressed challenge the old order, songs are
on their lips."

The Wobblies also created the most enduring
labor song, "Solidarity Forever," penned by Ralph
Chaplin during a l915 strike by coal miners in the Kanawha
Valley of West Virginia. Chaplin said he wanted "a
song...full of revolutionary fervor" with a chorus that
was "singing and defiant." Using the melody from
the infinitely adaptable "John Brown's Body,"
Chaplin created just that:

When the union's inspiration
Through the worker's blood shall run,
There can be no power greater
Anywhere beneath the sun.
Yet what force on earth is weaker
Than the feeble strength of one?
But the union makes us strong.

Folk music, the music of the people, is a
subversive music, whether it be the traditional
Anglo-American ballad from the mountains and rural areas of
the South or the rural blues-to-urban jazz continuum of the
African-American tradition. It is subversive because it
presents an alternative reality that sneaks through the
cracks of the hegemonic culture in which most of us live and
find our moral, aesthetic, and political values. The
hegemonic, or dominant, culture is the conventional wisdom,
the taken-for-grantedness of the world in which we live. It
is also what biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann calls
"the royal consciousness."

But the royal consciousness does not always
square with the experiences, the lived reality, of some
people and some groups in society, nor does it give adequate
expression to either the pain and sorrows, or the longings
and hopes, of those people. When this happens, an
alternative, a subversive counterculture, develops as a
critique of the dominant culture. It fills the gaps left by
the hegemonic but also points to its transformation by
including the hopes and aspirations of those left out.

This alternative culture seeks to use its
expressive power to mobilize its constituency to nurture the
solidarity that brings about spiritual and political change.
Denied access to the "high" or dominant culture,
the alternative culture draws on all the resources available
to folks at the margin.

For working-class Americans, the
churchits language, symbols, and, most important, its
musichas been a critical resource. As Edith Fowkes and
Tom Glazer have noted, "musically speaking, the line
from the church to the union hall is very often short and
direct. Some of the greatest union songs have been adopted
from hymns, gospel songs, and spirituals."

THE CLOSE ASSOCIATION of music and labor
that gave unions the reputation of being a singing movement
flowered in the first half of the 20th century. Many of the
best of those songs came from a handful of industries that
were especially crucial to American industrialization. They
were also those in which the workers were most exploited, the
conditions most dangerous, the greed of owners most
transparent, and the need for solidarity, militancy, and the
union most obviousmining, railroads, textiles, and
agriculture.

These songs were part of the classic folk
process. Borrowed from the church or other sources, they were
fashioned for the moment and then picked up by other
movements and causes as the occasion required. Sometimes, as
in the case of some of the most popular songs of the civil
rights movement, their earlier antecedentsas union
songs and even as hymnsare forgotten.

No song illustrates this process more than
the classic "We Shall Overcome," which in the 1960s
became the anthem of the civil rights movement. Not
surprisingly, the song's origins are in an African-American
gospel hymn, "I'll Overcome Someday," also known as
"I'll Be All Right." It was usually sung fast,
often with hand clapping. It was imported into the labor
movement in 1945 when several hundred tobacco
workersmostly women, mostly blackwent on strike
in Charleston, South Carolina. As Pete Seeger and Bob Raiser
tell the story, one of the workers, Lucille Simmons, loved to
sing it in the extremely slow "long meter" style.
She changed the first words from the individual "I"
to the collective "We."

Zilphia Horton, music director at the
Highlander Folk School, a labor school in Tennessee, learned
it in 1947 from members of the Food and Tobacco Workers'
Union. Horton took the song to union rallies all over the
South. In 1960, Guy Carawan taught the song to a workshop of
civil rights activists at Highlander, and later that year it
was sung at the founding convention of the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Within a few months it was
known as the unofficial theme song of the movement.

In 1936, John Hancock, an African-American
tenant farmer and lay preacher, wrote "Roll the Union
On" for the Southern Tenant Farmers Union. Hancock used
the old spiritual "Roll the Chariot On" to create a
defiant, power-engendering song with lines such as "If
the scabs get in the way, we're going to roll right over
them....We're going to roll the union on."

While not perfect, the labor movement often
told a different story about gender than the dominant
culture's version of genteel, middle-class family values that
saw a woman's proper place as in the home. Women and often,
of necessity, children made up a significant portion of the
exploited work force, especially in the textile industry.

Nowhere was the labor movement's vision of
a better life more fully expressed than in the dramatic 1912
strike of 20,000 textile workersmostly women and
childrenin Lawrence, Massachusetts, known as the
"bread and roses" strike. It was one of the most
democratically run strikes in labor history, with a strike
committee of 56 people representing the 27 different
languages spoken by the immigrant laborers.

During one of the many marches held by the
strikers, young girls carried a sign with the slogan,
"We want bread and roses too," a powerful reminder
that the union struggle was about the ability to enjoy beauty
as well as economic survival. The sign inspired poet James
Oppenheim to write the poem "Bread and Roses" which
was set to music by Caroline Kohlsaat:

As we come marching, marching
In the beauty of the day,
A million darkened kitchens,
A thousand mill lofts gray,
Are touched with all the radiance
That a sudden sun discloses,
For the people hear us singing:
"Bread and roses! Bread and roses!"

IN THE POST-INDUSTRIAL era, the penetration
of folk and working-class communities by the homogenizing
impact of television and other forms of popular culture began
to change the musical environment. In the 1960s, the voice
speaking of an alternative culture switched from the working
class to the affluent baby-boomer youth culture.

This has changed, but not ended, the
counterculture narration of working-class conditions. Means
and message are being adapted to the new conditions but there
is still continuity with the old. There remain singing
unions, such as the International Ladies' Garment Workers'
Union (ILGWU), which penetrated the national consciousness a
few years back by using music to urge people "to look
for the union label." Organizing troubadours like Si
Kahn, whose laments such as "Aragon Mill" are a
powerful portrait of contemporary working-class life, still
remain. There are also moments when popular mainstream music
suffused with working-class consciousness touches the nerve
of a mass audience, as does that of Bruce Springsteen.

The Wobblies remain right in warning
oppressors everywhere to "beware of a movement that
sings," for surely, in new ways and new places, the
songs of working people will rise again.

MARGARET HOVEN has recorded an album,
Urban Harvest, and currently works with children in the
Washington, D.C. public school system. DAVID EARLE ANDERSON is a
Washington, D.C. writer of poetry and essays. This article is
adapted from a workshop presented at a national retreat of the
Order of Sts. Martin and Teresa.

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